Elizabeth Lesly Stevens

Elizabeth Lesly Stevens brings nearly two decades of media experience to CEO Perspective Group's impact practice. In addition to advising executives on influence and visibility, she coaches select media and technology leaders. Over her many years as an editor and writer with Business Week magazine in New York, Elizabeth covered the emergence of the corporate-governance movement, including numerous fascinating corporate takeovers and power-struggles. Then, as Business Week's media editor, she authored many notable cover stories during a time of tremendous growth, ambition, consolidation and convergence in the media, entertainment and technology industries.

She has interviewed U.S. Senators and policy wonks; finance titans from KKR's Henry Kravis to Lazard's Michel David-Weill; visionary corporate leaders from Jack Welch to Bill Gates; a besieged CEO who quietly wept while ticking off his company's problems in an interview (tactfully not mentioned in the resulting story); a financier so excited to be profiled in Business Week that he chose to be photographed for the magazine clad only in a small bathing suit; and media titans including Rupert Murdoch, Howard Stringer, Bob Iger, Richard Parsons, Sumner Redstone, John Malone, and Jeff Bewkes.

Elizabeth was a media business columnist for New York magazine, and executive editor of Brill's Content, Steve Brill's high-profile if short-lived media magazine. She also spent a very educational year as a senior editor specializing in business- and political coverage at Tina Brown's Talk magazine, where she conceptualized and edited noteworthy pieces on Marc Rich, Bill Gates, and an amazing tale of a dissolute British peer and a New Jersey technology entrepreneur who had just gleefully struck a deal with the Taliban for Afghanistan's cell-phone concession.

She was a staff member, contributed to, or provided analysis as an interview subject for New York magazine, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, PBS's NewsHour, NPR's On the Media, Washington Monthly, among others.

Elizabeth has cheerfully endured her work being covered by the Village Voice, the New York Post columnists Keith Kelly and Liz Smith, the New York Times, and the late Molly Ivins. Given that breadth of experience, her insights and advice are helpful in prepping top executives for key media interviews.

Elizabeth graduated from the University of California and has a master's degree from Northwestern University. A longtime New Yorker, she now lives in San Francisco with her husband, a senior financial-services executive.

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